SAN FRANCISCO, CA --Secularism in America and Europe is a virtual religion,
with all the negative implications secularists assign to organized religion.

It’s combative, stifling, and can degrade into psychological bondage.
Secularists’ cosmology is environmentalism. Their morality is a mix of
Freudianism and libertarianism. Their ideology postulates an evil in the
world - organized religion.  Their rituals are embedded in their
conversations --- there’s a rigid and prescribed style to politically
correct speech and behavior, as rigid as any religious service.  They even
have a Eucharist: a host of drugs to enhance their prescribed way of life,
where pleasure and the avoidance of pain is morally right.  Their beliefs
stifle free speech and thought at our universities, taint the dispassionate
value of science, and seep into the arts. All that’s missing is an
authoritative Supreme Being, which they replace with the human ego.  In
other words, secularists display all the elements of organized religion
through the ages.

Most humanists would tell you that from their vista, religion is the root of
the world’s greatest evils.  They’ll point to wars through the ages, and of
course, contemporary bloodshed-- from Northern Ireland to the Sudan, and
certainly the religious behavior of the two main sects of Islam. Here,
they’re on solid ground.  The world’s great religions have all had enemies,
and wars have been fought over religion.  Secularists are no different.
Through the courts, the arts and occasionally in politics, they see
themselves in hand-to-hand conflict with belief-based religion.

They don’t regularly resort to violence.  But secularists have their
fundamentalist extremists.

When Kenyan biologist Florence Wambugu developed a virus-resistant sweet
potato that promised to feed millions, the Earth Liberation Front destroyed
her lab and her crops. In another blow to scientific progress, eco-fanatics
bombed a Minnesota plant genetics center to keep it from producing
life-saving agricultural research.  Last July, The Animal Liberation Front
tried to attack the Bel-Air home of a UCLA primate researcher with a
“Molotov cocktail,” but left it at the wrong house, according to an FBI
official.  On its Web site, the ALF claimed Fairbanks was keeping monkeys to
study “psychological, psychiatric and social problems such as Attention
Deficit Hyperactive Disorder, substance abuse, criminality and violence.”
The FBI has labeled animal rights extremism the biggest domestic terrorism
threat.

Much like the symbiotic relation between Northern Ireland terrorists and
their political supporters, secularists may outwardly condemn such actions,
but they sympathize with their cause.  Its much like the situation in Iraq,
where the average Sunni or Shiite may abhor the brutal tactics of the
respective death squads, but inwardly they accept the need for
counter-attack and revenge killings.

When Pat Buchanan first introduced the nation to the phrase, “cultural war”,
most democrats and many republicans thought it was extremist.  But, we see
now he was on to something. The division between those who are believers and
those who belong to the virtual religion of secularism are most definitely
in a low-grade battle for the hearts and minds of America.  That battle is
now played out in blogs, nightly talk shows, in university classrooms, and
at times at the ballot box.  When one side gains enough power to stifle the
other—for example, if under the guise of hate speech, conservative talk
radio is shut down -the tension could erupt beyond the boundaries of healthy
debate.

In Germany, Volksverhetzung (incitement of hatred against a minority) is a
punishable offense under Section 130 of the Strafgesetzbuch (Germany’s
criminal code) and can lead to up to five years imprisonment. In Canada,
advocating or inciting hatred against any ‘identifiable group’ is an
indictable offense under the Canadian Criminal Code with maximum terms of
two to fourteen years. Many U.S. schools and universities have speech codes
that prohibit hate speech. But who decides hate speech and critical speech.

Secularists trace their origins to the Age of Enlightenment, when freedom to
explore and express were embraced as the highest values.  This view
contrasted to the rigid authority of the Christian church, which condemned
all thought that didn’t embellish the perspective of the Bible.  Slowly but
most certainly, since the night Pat Buchanan announced a cultural war in
America, secularism is behaving more and more like an authoritative and
restrictive organized religion, the very enemy they claim to be battling.